Her waist is encircled with a black bustier. She
carries a black crocheted purse made by foster-daughter Debbie Bush and
her mom, and she twirls a black lace parasol.

Anna made the provocative hat that frames her blonde
curly wig and roguishly made-up lips.

A strategically placed beauty mark highlights her
left cheek.

Anna has been researching the Queen throughout
several states for the last decade.

“Along with Dan Sarber, Tyner, and Karin
Rettinger, Bourbon, we have been doing detective work,” she
said.

Her historical fiction book on the life of the
notorious woman is six chapters under way.

Anna will tell the story of the Queen in the first
person at the banquet.

“I was born in Warren County, Ohio. My
daddy, an honorable man, was killed in a battle in the Civil
War,” she says.

“I was left with an abusive mother who
continually threatened to send me to the House of Corrections, and I
never learned to read or write.

“I was forced into marriage with a much
older first husband (there were to be at least three), Amos Davis, at
the age of 13. After 4 months, he took me to St. Paul, Ind., where his
sister was the madam of a ‘sporting house.’

“I escaped through the window from my
first ‘john,’ and after a brief separation went
back with Davis, who physically and mentally abused me.

“I didn’t know what else to do.
I had nobody to take care of me.”

The couple both worked in the Montgomery Queen
circus.

“After divorcing Davis, I took to
drinking, and joined another circus, the Warner’s Circus,
before going to work at Miss Nell’s sporting house in
Indianapolis.”

Anna guesses the Queen figured that there was only
one way left for her — that of a whore.

Van Amburgh’s Circus came along after Mat
had been at Miss Nell’s about eight months.

On May 1, 1875, she took the part of the
“Beautiful Circassian Girl” and traveled through
the state until the show reached Plymouth.

Mat and her current boyfriend, Frank, boarded across
the river in Plymouth. When Frank left — and they all left,
sooner or later — she became the mistress of a young Plymouth
guy.

“And that’s how I first came to
Tyner and the Huckleberry Marsh.”

According to Adelbert Knott in his account of the
life and confessions of the Huckleberry Queen, published in 1879:

“The Huckleberry Marsh, which has become
famous all over the country, occupies an area of 3,000 acres, running
through Marshall, St. Joseph and Starke counties.

“From the earliest history of the state up
to the present time, it has been the hiding place of crime and will
continue to be the abode of desperadoes, in defiance of all state
laws.”

Sometimes called the “Swamp
Angel,” there are stories how the Queen saved men from
drowning, provided medicine for sick women and beat the stuffings out
of a man who raped a woman in the swamp.

For awhile she opened a restaurant in Tyner but, as
she put it in a bawdy way, “I didn’t do much
cooking.”

The Queen married her third husband, Jake
Falconbury, in 1879. She was 23 years old.

She said that she was going to give up her life of
shame and live like a decent woman should live in the future.

Did she? Could she?

Anna said, in her book, she is not going to preach.

“I am going to look carefully at how her
life was shaped beyond her control and she managed to exist, even if
society doesn’t agree.”

At the end of his manuscript, Adelbert Knott said it
well.

“Who can say that the Queen has not been
purified? Who can stand at the altar, pound their breast and cry out:
‘Lord, Lord, I thank Thee, that in Thy sight, I am so much
better than she!’”